


That Would Ascend the Darkest Heaven

by JackOfNone



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Grimdark, Horror, Lovecraftian, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:25:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/pseuds/JackOfNone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hell hath no fury like a monster scorned. Or, Calliope was dead, to begin with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Would Ascend the Darkest Heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lantadyme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/gifts).



> I was so excited to see all your prompts -- they were so awesome that I could hardly choose which one to write! I hope the results meet with your approval. 
> 
> For note, when I began this, the last thing we'd seen of the cherubs was [s] Caliborn: Enter. Some things have changed since then, so this story is pretty much an AU at this point. I suppose it was inevitable! 
> 
> Have a happy new year and thanks again for the great prompt!

Calliope had expected it to hurt when she died. She remembered dying in her dream, not so long ago, and it had been an experience she dreaded to repeat — a premonition that something was amiss, a dark shape in the shadows, then the sudden cold and ripping pain of the knife and the golden light of Prospit winking out forever. After that, when she’d gone to sleep to let her brother reign, there had only been darkness instead of gleaming towers and banners, and instead of trumpets and a queen she always thought might let her into court some day, there were whispers just on the edge of hearing and the promise of something great and terrible. When she went to sleep for the last time, she knew in her chiton and meat that she was dead now. That was all — no trumpet and fanfare, no screaming and pain, not even a flash of light or an ominous boom. She simply opened her eyes on the other side of dreaming and found they felt hollow and empty, and there was the cold sense of being unmoored in the pit of her gut. She knew with a terrible certainty that everything she had — her sylladex, her side of the room, her corner of their shared brain and the veins in their flesh that had always beat with bright green blood — was now his. 

Calliope had thought she had gotten used to being lonely, but really she had never been truly alone until now. 

She took a deep breath, but there was nothing to breathe. She scratched with her claws trying to find some purchase, but there was nothing solid to grab ahold of, only vast stretches of nothing in every direction. Calliope had never before moved while she slept — she’d stayed patiently curled into a ball until her brother laid down and ceded his control of their body for the time being, without so much as ever opening her eyes. 

Now, however, there was nothing to wait for, and nowhere to go back to. 

Narrowing her empty eyes against the darkness, Calliope let herself go and half sailed, half fell through the vast nothingness of death.

She knew she wasn’t truly alone in the darkness of the Furthest Ring, but that knowledge made her no less lonely. Her brother would still be looking for her —violent and singleminded as he was, there was no way he would rest while some scrap of her existence remained. His victory had to be total, or not at all. She floated past dream bubbles she dared not enter, lest she leave any trace that Caliborn could track. She would skim the edges carefully, pressing the soft undersides of her palms to thin veneer of reality that separated them from the void, felt it warp invitingly beneath her touch. 

On and on she drifted, listening to the murmur of the Furthest Ring. Sometimes she tried to imagine what her friends were doing, tried to think about what it would be like if she could join them, but it’s hard to be the hero when you’re dead, even of your own story. 

The whispers drew closer and further away at their own will, but they were never more than whispers in strange tongues she could not comprehend. She strained to hear but could never catch words — only sounds, maddeningly out of reach, their steady rise and fall almost akin to music. Sometimes she thought she caught shapes in the darkness — twisting, impossible shapes, eyes as vast as the red sun and tendrils thin and tiny enough to crawl inside the hollows of her eyes and rest there forever. Calliope did not let herself look at them for too long.

She did not know how long after her death it had been when she first heard a voice, faint but unmistakeable, amongst the whispers. It was a low, mournful keening, not words in any language Calliope knew, but understanding settled itself insider her brain as she let the sound wash over her. It was a call, unmistakeably.

_Who’s there?_

“I am,” Calliope said into the darkness. She hated the sound of her own voice — rasping and fierce, as ugly and harsh as the twisted face she shared with her brother — but it felt comforting to speak after what felt like so long. In answer, she received another noise, like a bubble of immense size bursting far away. 

_Help me._

“I’m coming,” Calliope said, sinking downwards towards the noise. The darkness of the Furthest Ring echoed her words, mirroring them back to her quietly and sweetly and everything she had ever wanted. “I’m coming,” she said again, just to hear the echo again, and descended. 

* * *

At first Calliope wasn’t sure whether what she was seeing was a person or a landscape. Tentacles, white and glistening, lay looped around the shattered remains of a dream bubble, its glassy surface reflecting the smooth curves of the creature that held them in its grip. Calliope drew closer, unafraid — there were many things out here in the darkness, but as none of them seemed to be her brother, they held no particular terror for her. 

The creature reached out with one of its smaller tendrils and Calliope touched it cautiously. It was wet and cold, and when she flickered her tongue in and out she could taste blood in the stifling non-air of the void. 

There was a rumbling deep within the forest of tentacles. Something shifted, and a curtain of flesh peeled away sluggishly to reveal a colorless eye that regarded Calliope mournfully. Suddenly, Calliope realized what this luminescent beast must be — a troll’s lusus, or the memory of one. She smiled a little, in spite of herself. If she stayed in a dream bubble, her brother would surely find her…but this lusus was not in a dream bubble, and as long as it remained that way Time could not touch her.

 _Help me,_ rumbled the creature again. Calliope steadied herself against its tentacle. 

“How?” she said. “I don’t…”

 _Hungry,_ said the creature. _Starving,_ it begged. 

“What do you eat?” Calliope asked, and with a plaintive glub as big as space itself the creature answered. 

_Everything_.

* * *

Her name, Calliope learned, was Gl'bgolyb, and she had once been lusus to a princess under the ocean. Calliope had no idea what an ocean was, and Gl' bgolyb explained that it was a nearly endless, quiet wet depth, a tiny slice of the Furthest Ring come to Alternia. Like everything else in this void of nonspace, she was a memory of something long dead; once, she had inhabited a dream bubble filled with others of her kind, but hunger had overwhelmed her and she had devoured them all before turning her beak on the bubble itself and clawed her way out. Calliope guided her to another bubble, this one wretchedly empty and abandoned, and watched as the great lusus shattered it with the hooked tentacles around her beak and drew it close, lapping up the shreds hungrily with a tongue as long as Calliope’s entire body. Calliope watched until Gl' bgolyb was finally finished, and the dream bubble was nothing but wisps of color floating along the endless dark.

 _Thank you,_ said Gl' bgolyb. Calliope shuddered. 

“Why didn’t you eat me?” she said. “You could have.” 

Gl' bgolyb wrapped her tentacles around Calliope gently and pulled her into a cold, clammy embrace. She clacked her beak, and a thought came into Calliope’s head of a girl she had never met — a princess among trolls, her hair glistening in the light of two moons and her orange horns gracefully curved. _You remind me of someone I loved._

“I’m not a troll,” Calliope said, hiding her face in her claws. “Not really. I’m not beautiful.” One tiny tendril of Gl'bgolyb’s snaked out and tilted her chin up to face one of her great eyes, and Calliope understood that perhaps all small creatures looked alike to Gl’bgolyb. “Whatever your princess felt for you, I can’t feel that,” Calliope said, but even as she said it she knew that it mattered very little to Gl’bgolyb. The world she’d known was gone. She’d even had a hand in its destruction, but now that it was gone she missed it.

Gl'bgolyb wanted a name, now. Calliope hesitated, old habits dying hard, but her brother had broken the rules and their game was long over. 

“Calliope,” she said, and the void echoed it back again — beautiful, sweet as a symphony, Callie Ohpee, princess among trolls, everything she ever wanted. 

Gl' bgolyb was still hungry. Calliope pressed her face into Gl' bgolyb’s yielding pale flesh and sighed. She thought of how big Gl' bgolyb seemed, and how small she was, and her thoughts wandered to her brother, still out there somewhere, playing the game they had been intended to play together. Even as a Muse, she was still only one player, one small memory. 

But Gl' bgolyb was vast, and the whispers in the dark were vaster still. 

“I know precisely the thing,” she said, imagining the fierce beak tearing into him, shredding him limb from limb and dumping his unmoored spirit into the Furthest Ring. Gl'bgolyb, who seemed to know her mind, rumbled with approval. 

* * *

Following Caliborn wasn’t so difficult — after all, he was still alive and he destroyed everything he touched. 

Calliope stood in the center of an impossible chessboard, a battlefield prototyped a hundred times over. It looked like someone had cracked the ground over his knee — there was a great wound in the center where the edges of the battlefield dissolved into sparks of code and strangely familiar whispers, and the Furthest Ring had started to seep into the shattered edges of this Skaia. Two of Gl’bgolyb’s massive tentacles prodded the edges of this reality, searching for purchase. She couldn’t fit herself through that crack, and Calliope doubted that she could have gone inside in any case. Ordinarily this place would be completely inaccessible to the both of them, being dead and products of a different session besides, but Gl’bgolyb had given her a present when her strength had returned. It was a blank book, its cover black as the void and shot through with faintly glimmering lights that were not stars, and when Calliope traced her finger across its pages it left a scrawling line of pale grey not-letters that Calliope nevertheless understood. 

Calliope wrote herself the tale of a ghostly lime-blood troll, beautiful and kind and wise, who heralded the end of a dead session and when she looked up she was standing there on the edge of the void, watching an alien battlefield dissolve into dust and command line prompts under the relentless assault of the meteors raining from the sky.

This session was long since dead — her brother had wrought its ruin and moved on. And he was so singleminded, so relentlessly obtuse and certain of his own superiority, that he never thought to look behind him. 

The battlefield was littered with corpses — mostly the broken forms of Dersites and Prospitians, but here and there the bodies of flesh and blood human children. 

Most Sburb sessions failed, and the human’s universe had produced more sessions than most. Calliope was well aware of this fact. But still, seeing it first hand was a bit daunting. She let the dry wind rush over the gaps in her carapace and pulled her suit jacket closer around her.

Somewhere on the corpse-strewn battlefield, Calliope caught something stirring out of the corner of her eye. Cautiously, Calliope crept towards its source — a pile of bodies and debris, with a solitary spike of shattered Battlefield pointing skyward. 

She was lying impaled on the Battlefield’s broken shard, her flesh charred, her bright red blood running in sluggish rivulets down the slick black-and-white surface to pool on the pockmarked ground. The human girl’s head thrashed as Calliope approached, her mouth twisted open in a silent scream. Calliope recognized her tattered robes — a Sylph of Blood, a mender of broken bonds, and god tier at that. The girl’s body shuddered as she finally, gratefully, died; the corpse, however, was only dead a moment before it dissolved into a cascade of colors and pixels. 

A passive class with no one in the universe left to protect, her death could not be heroic. Alone in a world that was already broken beyond repair, she could do nothing that would make her death just. 

The girl’s body reconfigured itself on the ground, curled into one of the craters. Her eyes were closed, and Calliope watched her labored breathing for a moment and wondered if this was what her human friends might look like if they died. 

The girl opened her eyes and looked straight at Calliope. Calliope reached up to make sure her wig was still in place, at least. “Hello,” she said, on the off chance the girl could hear her. “I’ve never met a human before. Not in person, at least!” She peeked out from behind her fingers and waited for a response.

The girl stared at her uncomprehendingly, then started to cry quietly. Calliope buried her face in her claws, backed away, and sat down facing away from the little Sylph. She pulled her notebook out of her jacket and began to trace her hands across the next blank page. 

_The lime-blood was very sad to see that the humans’ session had failed! It must be miserable, she thought, being stuck like that in a universe that was doomed from the beginning. Callie thought she could help, but in the end her awful brother had already been here and made a dreadful mess of everything! Luckily, Callie had made a friend._

Behind her, the little god tier girl kept crying to herself as though she would never stop. 

_Callie might have been just one little dead troll that nobody could see, but her friend was bigger than anything — bigger than a whole doomed universe, even._

And because she wrote it, it was true. The fabric of the sky trembled as Gl’bgolyb’s beak closed around it. 

_Princess Callie left the failed universe to be with her lusus, but she’d learned that maybe there were worse things than to be dead._

Calliope curled against one of Gl’bgolyb’s tentacles as she wrapped her tongue around the now-tiny Sburb session and swallowed it whole. 

* * *

“I think it was my brother that did it,” Calliope said. She spent most of her time exploring Gl’bgolyb’s forest of tentacles now that she was strong and no longer really needed Calliope’s help to find more food. She’d grown bigger, too, or so Calliope thought, but space was increasingly growing as fuzzy as time out here in the void. “I think he did something to your session.” Gl’bgolyb rumbled, and Calliope huddled up into the bow-like curve of her tendril. Being here with another creature — someone who was actually really there, not half a universe away or sharing her body while she was sleeping — was strange and new. 

Gl’bgolyb was angry, Calliope knew. Her princess, her _daughter_ , had died in their ruined session — their friends had turned on each other, the culmination of a hundred lifetimes of strife and violence. Gl’bgolyb told her of a demoness who heralded death and a vision from the Furthest Ring of an invincible monster — a beast who had groomed Alternia for his entry, primed it to be washed with blood at the end.

Gl’bgolyb’s voice was like something viscous dripping into a vast, quiet pond, and Calliope nodded. “We need to find him,” she agreed. “But…” Calliope chewed her tongue, and Gl’bgolyb cooed. “I’m scared of him,” she admitted. “And he’s hard to find.” 

Gl’bgolyb’s tentacles waved, stretching out into the darkness — beckoning to the void. Around the edges of Calliope’s mind, she could feel a presence drawing closer, pawing at the gap her brother had left in her consciousness 

_Don’t be afraid,_ Gl’bgolyb seemed to be saying to her. 

The darkness warped around her, welcoming. Calliope caught the suggestion of eyes, vaster than Gl’bgolyb’s and seeing further, and tongues and teeth and alien geometries. 

_They can help you._

Calliope hesitated, staying close to Gl’bgolyb’s comforting embrace. Gl’bgolyb’s tendrils trembled, nudging her gently forward. 

“The Noble Circle,” Calliope said, and again they echoed her words. 

_Noble Circle,_ they said, and it sounded perfect — the voice of a real Muse of Space, a troll princess, powerful and dangerous and beautiful. 

_Join us. Help us._ Calliope hesitated. _Accept us_. 

Calliope ran her claws over a blank page of her notebook and found that the light grey lines formed themselves into a picture this time — beautifully rendered, a creature with a thousand limbs and eyes suffering uselessly in the void, her brother’s handiwork. A beautiful princess robed in black thorns, her wands held high. Calliope read the gibbering madness of their letters and thought of the little god tier girl that Gl’bgolyb had swallowed whole, along with her entire universe. 

“They look like you,” Calliope whispered to Gl’bgolyb, who nudged her forward again. This time, she allowed Gl’bgolyb to push her out into the waiting arms of the darkness between worlds. 

“I think I accept your very kind proposal,” Calliope said. The darkness howled in joy, and behind her she knew that Gl’bgolyb was very proud of her. 

* * *

_Once upon a time, there was a session that was void and wouldn’t amount to anything. The Princess’s wicked brother thought that he would find her there, and so he clawed his way in — the Page of Hope tried to hold it back but the Lord of Time was already there inside his head, and he wasn’t at all pleased with his new form! Unlike the Princess, he hated humans. So he made some changes. The Page of Hope opened his mouth to scream but his mouth wasn’t his mouth at all any more, and his eyes weren’t his eyes and he let out a noise that wasn’t a scream at all._

“Jake! Jake!” Roxy screamed, but it was lost in the vast and horrible sound that drowned out anything in earshot. Behind her, she heard Dirk choke. Jane’s hands tightened around her shoulders, trembling. 

It wasn’t Jake anymore, that’s for sure. Whatever it was that had stolen Jake’s body had torn away scraps of flesh to reveal a bulging green carapace, a face like a skull filled with needle-sharp teeth and eyes that flashed the colors of the broken void. 

_Her brother was very strong and very scary! All of the Princess’s friends were afraid. But really, it was her brother that should have been scared._

It took Roxy a moment to realize that the monster was laughing. Screwing her eyes shut, her tears making her mascara run in black streaks down her face, she screamed one word over and over again like a magic charm. 

“Calliope! Calliope!” 

_That was the signal the Princess had been waiting for! Her brother heard her name, and he knew what was coming, and he began to run._

Caliborn laughed, and the sky trembled. Roxy screamed again, and he staggered towards her, claws out. 

The sky cracked, and wept. Caliborn swiveled his head skyward and snarled. 

(were you trying to hide)

Her voice is tiny but audible all the way across Skaia, inescapable.

“Fuck you!” Caliborn growled to the sky, his voice impossibly deep and loud. Roxy clapped her hands over her ears. 

(how do you expect to outrun me)

Her voice twists into black and red tendrils and dripping with strange inflections, barely louder than a whisper though it seemed as though it’s just at Caliborn’s ear. The ground beneath Caliborn was soft and wet, the air was black and staring, he was clawing handfuls of black tendrils from the sky and still there were more, squirming over his flesh, swarming the cavernous valleys of his features.

(when I am already everywhere) 

Caliborn opened his mouth to scream but she — they — are there too. 

_The Princess’s brother didn’t know that he’d hurt a lot of people, and that was his downfall. Princess Callie, you see, had a lot of friends._

Roxy screamed Calliope’s name over and over again, but it wasn’t until the vast, terrible laughing stopped that she managed to pry open her eyes. Dirk and Jane were nowhere to be seen. The great hulking thing that had torn Jake apart was still there, black thorns swarming through the gaps in his shifting green coat. 

The massive monster shook out its white hair, and Roxy caught the glint of enormous, troll-like horns — bright orange spires, twisting in on each other, barbed and bright. 

A hush settled over Skaia, like the hush of the grave and the quiet of the void.

The great hulking shape sat gently down on the ground as Roxy watched, and pulled a notebook from its coat. 

_The Princess was so glad to be back in her body! She changed it around a little too, because her brother hadn’t been very nice to it. It was great to have horns, and to bleed green again. It had been so very long since Princess Callie had had a body to call her own that at first she didn’t know what to do with herself! Her royal lusus would be so proud of her. Maybe she could come help her give this session a happier death._

_But wait! Princess Callie heard someone behind her, crying and making these sad human noises. What if it was one of her friends? She had to see. Maybe her friend would want to meet her lusus too! They could all be happy together._

Roxy sobbed and cradled her empty rifle, to terrified to speak.

The creature turned, its green eyes wide and wet with something black and sticky. 

“Ca…Calliope?” Roxy gasped, and the creature pulled back its lips to reveal a smile full of teeth. 

Slowly, Calliope closed the notebook on her lap and moved to comfort her friend. 

**Author's Note:**

> The scene with the dead Sburb session was inspired by a post I saw on Tumblr ages ago that appears to have since been lost to the mists. I'll do my best to dig it up.


End file.
